Zoe Zenghelis: Fields, Fragments, Fictions comes to Carnegie

1: Zoe Zenghelis, Walking City, 1996. oil on canvas, 42 × 54 cm. Private Collection

2: Zoe Zenghelis, Happiness, 2000. oil on canvas, 56.00 x 91.00 cm. Private Collection

Carnegie Museum of Art announces Zoe Zenghelis: Fields, Fragments, Fictions, the first solo exhibition featuring the paintings of artist and educator Zoe Zenghelis in the United States. Opening March 26 and on view through July 24, 2022, the monographic show will celebrate the interdisciplinary breadth of Zenghelis’s art practice by bringing her independent work in dialogue with her collaborative projects and teaching methods, as well as with objects from the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition will be staged in the galleries of the Heinz Architectural Center at Carnegie Museum of Art, one of the nation’s foremost institutes for the study and curation of architecture. Zenghelis together with Theodossis Issaias, Associate Curator, Heinz Architectural Center, and Hamed Khosravi, architect and educator at the Architectural Association School of Architecture have collaborated at every step of the way to select and present this important body of work.

Born in Athens in 1937, Zoe Zenghelis studied stage design and painting in London, where she has lived and worked since the late 1950s. In 1975, Zenghelis—alongside architects Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis and artist Madelon Vriesendorp—co-founded the architectural practice Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). OMA’s early projects were realized through images as visual manifestos and provocations that offered a polemical critique to the discipline of architecture. Instead of a single totalizing vision of the city, OMA celebrated the multiplicity of metropolitan life and the surrealism of the everyday. This collaborative work and Zoe Zenghelis’s approach to artmaking redefined the visual culture of architecture and opened new possibilities for thinking about space and the built environment through the medium of painting. Zenghelis collaborated with Vriesendorp to transpose this exploration into a teaching method at the Color Workshop, an experimental course they taught together at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London from 1982 until 1993. By fostering a studio culture based on play and discovery, they cultivated the spatial imagination of students and challenged established conventions of architectural representation.

For more than 60 years, Zenghelis’s practice has remained consistent. With thick layers of paint, abstract geometries, assemblies of forms, and eruptive color palettes, she meticulously composes pictorial surfaces on stretched canvas or card. Populated with building fragments, abstract tectonics, and metropolitan landscapes, Zenghelis’s paintings construct worlds of imagination and fiction. From seductive metropolitan formations and dystopian landscapes to floating buildings and cityscapes of disturbing stillness, the poetics of Zenghelis are an inquiry to the city and its architecture. “My paintings became influenced by my architectural experiences, but they work differently as conceptual views of my own world of images,” says Zenghelis. “My affinity with architecture is thematic and goes into a genre that could be called pure fiction. The straight rendering gets reduced to conceptual elements that are of a different nature; they are in a state of dematerialization to enter the world of imagination.”

Zoe Zenghelis: Fields, Fragments, Fictions will be anchored by four narratives and areas of practice. These include: the artist’s independent projects from 1982 to today (“Cities of Our Choice”); Zenghelis’s work as a teacher and a learner (“Spaces of Learning”); the urban projects of OMA and the modes of collaboration and creative exchange between the four founding members (“Metropolitan Affairs”); and the lesser-known projects of OMA in the Mediterranean islands in relation to Zenghelis’s long-standing engagement with landscape paintings of her homeland, Greece (“Arcadias Inverted”). The show is punctuated with objects from the museum’s permanent collection, selected by the artist to situate her work in a constellation of influences and relations between her students, friends, and teachers—real or imaginary.

More information about Zoe Zenghelis: Fields, Fragments, Fictions and its events can be found at https://cmoa.org/exhibition/zoe-zenghelis/